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Pattern RecognitionHeroin, she's read, is cheaper here than it's ever been, the market still glutted by the initial dumping ofAfghani opium supplies.Done with her toes, she changes to heels, craning her neck to be certain her feet are correctly aligned. Shelikes Pilates because it isn't, in the way she thinks of yoga, meditative. You have to keep your eyes open, here,and pay attention.That concentration counters the anxiety she feels now, the pre job jitters she hasn't experienced in a while.She's here on Blue Ant's ticket. Relatively tiny in terms of permanent staff, globally distributed, morepost geographic than multinational, the agency has from the beginning billed itself as a high speed,low drag life form in an advertising ecology of lumbering herbivores. Or perhaps as somenon carbon based life form, entirely sprung from the smooth and ironic brow of its founder, HubertusBigend, a nominal Belgian who looks like Tom Cruise on a diet of virgins' blood and truffled chocolates.The only thing Cayce enjoys about Bigend is that he seems to have no sense at all that his name might seemridiculous to anyone, ever. Otherwise, she would find him even more unbearable than she already does.It's entirely personal, though at one remove.Still doing heels, she checks her watch, a Korean clone of an old school Casio G Shock, its plastic casesanded free of logos with a scrap of Japanese micro abrasive. She is due in Blue Ant's Soho offices in fiftyminutes.She drapes a pair of limp green foam pads over the foot rail, carefully positions her feet, lifts them on invisiblestiletto heels, and begins her ten prehensile.1. THE WEBSITE OF DREADFUL NIGHT7

Pattern Recognition2. BITCHContents Prev / NextCPUs for the meeting, reflected in the window of a Soho specialist in mod paraphernalia, are a fresh FruitT shirt, her black Buzz Rickson's MA 1, anonymous black skirt from a Tulsa thrift, the black leggings she'dworn for Pilates, black Harajuku schoolgirl shoes. Her purse analog is an envelope of black East Germanlaminate, purchased on eBayif not actual Stasi issue then well in the ballpark.She sees her own gray eyes, pale in the glass, and beyond them Ben Sherman shirts and fishtail parkas,cufflinks in the form of the RAF roundel that marked the wings of Spitfires.CPUs. Cayce Pollard Units. That's what Damien calls the clothing she wears. CPUs are either black, white, orgray, and ideally seem to have come into this world without human intervention.What people take for relentless minimalism is a side effect of too much exposure to the reactor cores offashion. This has resulted in a remorseless paring down of what she can and will wear. She is, literally,allergic to fashion. She can only tolerate things that could have been worn, to a general lack of comment,during any year between 1945 and 2000. She's a design free zone, a one woman school of and whose veryausterity periodically threatens to spawn its own cult.Around her the bustle of Soho, a Friday morning building toward boozy lunches and careful chatter in allthese restaurants. To one of which, Charlie Don't Surf, she will be going for an obligatory post meeting meal.But she feels herself tipping back down into a miles long trough of jet lag, and knows that that is what shemust surf now. her lack of serotonin, the delayed arrival of her soul.She checks her watch and heads down the street, toward Blue Ant, whose premises until recently were thoseof an older, more linear sort of agency.The sky is a bright gray bowl, crossed with raveled contrails, and as she presses the button to announce herselfat Blue Ant, she wishes she'd brought her sunglasses.SEATED now, opposite Bernard Stonestreet, familiar from Blue Ant's New York operation, she finds himpale and freckled as ever, with carroty hair upswept in a weird Aubrey Beardsley flame motif that might bethe result of his having slept on it that way, but is more likely the work of some exclusive barber. He iswearing what Cayce takes to be a Paul Smith suit, more specifically the 118 jacket and the 11T trouser, cutfrom something black. In London his look seems to be about wearing many thousand pounds' worth ofgarments that appear to have never been worn before having been slept in, the night before. In New York heprefers to look as though he's just been detailed by a tight scrum of specialists. Different cultural parameters.On his left sits Dorotea Benedetti, her hair scraped back from her forehead with a haute nerd intensity thatCayce suspects means business and trouble both. Dorotea, whom Cayce knows glancingly from previous andminor business in New York, is something fairly high up in the graphics design partnership of Heinzi & Pfaff.She has flown in, this morning, from Frankfurt, to present H&P's initial shot at a new logo for one of theworld's two largest manufacturers of athletic footwear. Bigend has defined a need for this maker tore identify, in some profound but so far unspecified way. Sales of athletic shoes, "trainers" in themirror world, are tanking bigtime, and the skate shoes that had already started to push them under aren'tdoing too well either. Cayce herself has been tracking the street level emergence of what she thinks of as82. BITCH

Pattern Recognition"urban sur vival" footwear, and though this is so far at the level of consumer re purposing, she has no doubtthat commodification will soon follow identification.The new logo will be this firm's pivot into the new century, and Cayce, with her marketable allergy, has beenbrought over to do in person the thing that she does best. That seems odd to her, or if not odd, archaic. Whynot teleconference? There may be so much at stake, she supposes, that security is an issue, but it's been awhile now since business has required her to leave New York.Whatever, Dorotea's looking serious about it. Serious as cancer. On the table in front of her, perhaps amillimeter too carefully aligned, is an elegant gray cardboard envelope, fifteen inches on a side, bearing theaustere yet whimsical logo of Heinzi & Pfaff. It is closed with one of those expensively archaic fastenersconsisting of a length of cord and two small brown cardboard buttons.Cayce looks away from Dorotea and the envelope, noting that a great many Nineties pounds had once beenlavished on this third floor meeting room, with its convexly curving walls of wood suggesting the first classlounge of a transatlantic zeppelin. She notices threaded anchors exposed on the pale veneer of the convexwall, where once had been displayed the logo of whichever agency previously occupied the place, and earlywarning signs of Blue Ant renovation are visible as well: scaffolding erected in a hallway, where someone hasbeen examining ductwork, and rolls of new carpeting stacked like plastic wrapped logs from a polyesterforest.Dorotea may have attempted to out minimalize her this morning, Cayce decides. If so, it hasn't worked.Dorotea's black dress, for all its apparent simplicity, is still trying to say several things at once, probably in atleast three languages. Cayce has hung her Buzz Rickson's over the back of her chair, and now she catchesDorotea looking at it.The Rickson's is a fanatical museum grade replica of a U.S. MA 1flying jacket, as purely functional andiconic a garment as the previous century produced. Dorotea's slow burn is being accelerated, Cayce suspects,by her perception that Cayce's MA 1 trumps any attempt at minimalism, the Rickson's having been createdby Japanese obsessives driven by passions having nothing at all to do with anything remotely like fashion.Cayce knows, for instance, that the characteristically wrinkled seams down either arm were originally theresult of sewing with pre war industrial machines that rebelled against the slippery new material, nylon. Themakers of the Rickson's have exaggerated this, but only very slightly, and done a hundred other things, tinythings, as well, so that their product has become, in some very Japanese way, the result of an act of worship. Itis an imitation more real somehow than that which it emulates. It is easily the most expensive garment Cayceowns, and would be virtually impossible to replace."You don't mind?" Stonestreet producing a pack of cigarettes called Silk Cut, which Cayce, never a smoker,thinks of as somehow being the British equivalent of the Japanese Mild Seven. Two default brands ofcreatives. .'"No," says Cayce. "Please do."There is actually an ashtray on the table, a small one, round and perfectly white. As archaic a fixture inAmerica, in the context of a business meeting, as would be one of those flat and filigreed absinthe trowels.(But in London, she knew, you might encounter those as well, though she'd not yet seen one at a meeting.)"Dorotear1" Offering the pack, but not to Cayce. Dorotea declining. Stonestreet puts a filter tip between histidily mobile lips and takes out a box of matches that Cayce assumes were acquired in some restaurant thenight before. The matchbox looks very nearly as expensive as Dorotea's gray envelope. He lights up. "Sorrywe had to haul you over for this, Cayce," he says. The spent match makes a tiny ceramic sound when he drops2. BITCH9

Pattern Recognitionit into the ashtray."It's what I do, Bernard," Cayce says. " '&"You look tired," says Dorotea."Four hours difference." Smiling with only the corners of her mouth."Have you tried those pills from New Zealand?" Stonestreet asks. Cayce remembers that his American wife,once the ingenue in a shortlived X Files clone, is the creator of an apparently successful line of vaguelyhomeopathic beauty products."Jacques Cousteau said that jet lag was his favorite drug.""Well?" Dorotea looks pointedly at the H&P envelope.Stonestreet blows a stream of smoke. "Well yes, I suppose we should."They both look at Cayce. Cayce looks Dorotea in the eye. "Ready when you are."Dorotea unwinds the cord from beneath the cardboard button nearest Cayce. Lifts the flap. Reaches in withthumb and forefinger.There is a silence."Well then," Stonestreet says, and stubs out his Silk Cut.Dorotea removes an eleven inch square of art board from the envelope. Holding it at the upper corners,between the tips of perfectly manicured forefingers, she displays it to Cayce.There is a drawing there, a sort of scribble in thick black Japanese brush, a medium she knows to be thein house hallmark of Herr Heinzi himself. To Cayce, it most resembles a syncopated sperm, as rendered bythe American underground cartoonist Rick Griffin, circa 1967. She knows immediately that it does not, by theopaque standards of her inner radar, work. She has no way of knowing how she knows.Briefly, though, she imagines the countless Asian workers who might, should she say yes, spend years of theirlives applying versions of this symbol to an endless and unyielding flood of footwear. What would it mean tothem, this bouncing sperm? Would it work its way into their dreams, eventually? Would their children chalk itin doorways before they knew its meaning as a trademark?"No," she says.Stonestreet sighs. Not a deep sigh. Dorotea returns the drawing to its envelope but doesn't bother to reseal it.Cayce's contract for a consultation of this sort specifies that she absolutely not be asked to critique anything,or provide creative input of any sort. She is only there to serve as a very specialized piece of human litmuspaper.Dorotea takes one of Stonestreet's cigarettes and lights it, dropping the wooden match on the table beside theashtray. "How was the winter, then, in New York?"102. BITCH

Pattern Recognition"Cold," Cayce says."And sad? It is still sad?"Cayce says nothing."You are available to stay here," Dorotea asks, "while we go back to the drawing board?"Cayce wonders if Dorotea knows the cliche. "I'm here for two weeks," she says. "Flat sitting for a friend.""A vacation, then.""Not if I'm working on this." ''Dorotea says nothing."It must be difficult," Stonestreet says, between steepled, freckled fingers, his red thatch rising above themlike flames from a burning cathedral, "when you don't like something. Emotionally, I mean."Cayce watches Dorotea rise and, carrying her Silk Cut, cross to a sideboard, where she pours Perrier into atumbler."It isn't about liking anything, Bernard," Cayce says, turning back to Stonestreet, "it's like that roll of carpet,there; it's either blue or it's not. Whether or not it's blue isn't something I have an emotional investment in."She feels bad energy brush past her as Dorotea returns to her seat.Dorotea puts her water down beside the H&P envelope and does a rather inexpert job of stubbing out hercigarette. "I will speak with Heinzi this afternoon. I would call him now but I know that he is in Stockholm,meeting with Volvo."The air seems very thick with smoke now and Cayce feels like coughing."There's no rush, Dorotea," Stonestreet says, and Cayce hopes that this means that there really, really is.CHARLIE Don't Surf is full, the food California inflected Vietnamese fusion with more than the usualleavening of colonial Frenchness. The white walls are decorated with enormous prints of close upblack and white photographs of 'Nam era Zippo lighters, engraved with crudely drawn American militarysymbols, still cruder sexual motifs, and stenciled slogans. These remind Cayce of photographs of tombstonesin Confederate graveyards, except for the graphic content and the nature of the slogans, and the 'Nam themesuggests to her that the place has been here for a while.IF I HAD A FARM IN HELL AND A HOUSE IN VIETNAM I'D SELL THEM BOTHThe lighters in the photographs are so worn, so dented and sweat corroded, that Cayce may well be the firstdiner to ever have deciphered these actual texts.BURY ME FACE DOWN SO THE WORLD CAN KISS MY ASS"His surname actually is 'Heinzi,' you know," Stonestreet is saying, pouring a second glass of the Californiancabernet that Cayce, though she knows better, is drinking. "It only sounds like a nickname. Any given names,2. BITCH11

Pattern Recognitionthough, have long since gone south.""Ibiza," Cayce suggests."Er?""Sorry, Bernard, I'm tired.""Those pills. From New Zealand."THERE IS NO GRAVITY THE WORLD SUCKS"I'll be fine." A sip of wine. "She's a piece of work, isn't she?""Dorotea?"Stonestreet rolls his eyes, which are a peculiar brown, inflected as with Mercurochrome; something iridescent,greenly copper tinged.173 AIRBORNEShe asks after the American wife. Stonestreet dutifully recounts the launch of a cucumber based mask, thethin end of a fresh wedge of product, touching on the politics involved in retail placement. Lunch arrives.Cayce concentrates on tiny fried spring rolls, setting herself for auto nod and periodically but sympatheticallyraised eyebrows, grateful that he's carrying the conversational ball. She's way down deep in that trough now,with the half glass of cabernet starting to exert its own lateral influence, and she knows that her best coursehere is to make nice, get some food in her stomach, and be gone.But the Zippo tombstones, with their existential elegies, tug at her.PHU CATRestaurant art that diners actually notice is a dubious idea, particularly to one with Cayce's peculiar, visceral,but still somewhat undefined sensitivities."So when it looked as though Harvey Knickers weren't going to come aboardNod, raise eyebrows, chew spring roll. This is working. She covers her glass when he starts to pour her morewine.And so she makes it easily enough through lunch with Bernard Stonestreet, blipped occasionally by theseemblematic place names from the Zippo graveyard (cu CHI, QUI NHON ) lining the walls, and at last he haspaid and they are standing up to leave.Reaching for her Rickson's, where she'd hung it on the back of her chair, she sees a round, freshly made hole,left shoulder, rear, the size of the lit tip of a cigarette. Its edges are minutely beaded, brown, with meltednylon. Through this is visible a gray interlining, no doubt to some particular Cold War mil spec pored overby the jacket's otaku makers."Is something wrong?"122. BITCH

Pattern Recognition"No," Cayce says, "nothing." Putting on her ruined Rickson's.Near the door, on their way out, she numbly registers a shallow Lu cite cabinet displaying an array of thoseactual Vietnam Zippos, perhaps a dozen of them, and automatically leans closer.SHIT ON MY DICK OR BLOOD ON MY BLADEWhich is very much her attitude toward Dorotea, right now, though she doubts she'll be able to do anythingabout it, and will only turn the anger against herself.13

Pattern Recognition3. THE ATTACHMENTContents Prev / NextShe's gone to Harvey Nichols and gotten sick.Should have known better.How she responds to labels.Down into menswear, unrealistically hoping that if anyone might have a Buzz Rickson's it would be HarveyNichols, their ornate Victorian pile rising like a coral reef opposite Knightsbridge station. Somewhere on theground floor, in cosmetics, they even have Helena Stonestreet's cucumber mask, Bernard having explained toher how he'd demonstrated his considerable powers of suasion on the HN buyers.But down here, next to a display of Tommy Hilfiger, it's all started to go sideways on her, the trademark thing.Less warning aura than usual. Some people ingest a single peanut and their head swells like a basketball.When it happens to Cayce, it's her psyche.Tommy Hilfiger does it every time, though she'd thought she was safe now. They'd said he'd peaked, in NewYork. Like Benetton, the name would be around, but the real poison, for her, would have been drawn. It'ssomething to do with context, here, with not expecting it in London. When it starts, it's pure reaction, likebiting down hard on a piece of foil.A glance to the right and the avalanche lets go. A mountainside of Tommy coming down in her head.My God, don't they know? This stuff is simulacra of simulacra of simulacra. A diluted tincture of RalphLauren, who had himself diluted the glory days of Brooks Brothers, who themselves had stepped on theproduct of Jermyn Street and Savile Row, flavoring their ready to wear with liberal lashings of polo knit andregimental stripes. But Tommy surely is the null point, the black hole. There must be some Tommy Hil figerevent horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, moredevoid of soul. Or so she hopes, and doesn't know, but suspects in her heart that this in fact is what accountsfor his long ubiquity.She needs out of this logo maze, desperately. But the escalator to the street exit will dump her back intoKnightsbridge, seeming somehow now more of the same, and she remembers that the street runs down, andalways her energy with it, to Sloane Square, another nexus of whatever she suffers these reactions to. LauraAshley, down there, and that can get ugly.Remembering the fifth floor

pattern recognition william gibson viking an imprint of penguin books pattern recognition edg stylesheet 1. contents 1. the website of dreadful night 2. bitch 3. the attachment 4. math grenades 5. what they deserve 6. the match factory 7. the proposition 8. watermark 9. trans 10. jack moves, jame faces 11. boone chu 12. apopheniaFile Size: 738KB